Objectification

About how they transform locations of historical significance, setting up tense but productive relationships between a place's factual past, its current economic imperatives, and the private engagement of both visitors and inhabitants with their own version of its importance. The parable is told through the journey of one character who brings to life, and weaves together the issues explored in the work, eventually turning into a sort of contemporary architectural ruin factory. The full film below:

The explanation film below runs through all the concepts and ideas that fed into and structured both the film, and the architectural explorations around it. The previous year I had gotten rather wound up by some of Baudrillard's writing, and this work was something of a reaction to his gloomy paradoxes about contemporary culture... i had wanted to approach the kitsch of tourism with an appreciative eye. Even though overall it maybe a somewhat despairing tale about the misapprehension of substantive relationships between form and meaning, it does locate points of interest within that ubiquitous way of approaching places and things, which eventually led in more propositional forms to the following project, the Church of Perpetual Experimentation, and subsequent investigations. The project was awarded the AA Prize 2007

Throughout the course of the project I was drawing, modelling, and designing sets and situations (see some images below) that riffed on the themes developing in the film, which itself had many many manifestations throughout the year I spent working on it, with quite a few films of similar length being produced, and alot of material being made, which never quite made the final cut; the cut itself being a bit of grand cannibalisation from a prior coterie of exploratory films.